Boley cleared his throat. “Series?”
“And you’re in it!” shrilled the little man in orange. “This way to the dressing room.”
Well, a dressing room was a dressing room, even if this one did have color television screens all around it and machines that went
wheepety-boom
softly to themselves. Boley began to feel at home.
He blinked when they handed his uniform to him, but he put it on. Back in the Steel & Coal League, he had sometimes worn uniforms that still bore the faded legend
100 Lbs. Best Fortified Gro-Chick,
and whatever an owner gave you to put on was all right with Boley. Still, he thought to himself,
kilts
!
It was the first time in Boley’s life that he had ever worn a skirt. But when he was dressed it didn’t look too bad, he thought—especially because all the other players (it looked like fifty of them, anyway) were wearing the same thing. There is nothing like seeing the same costume on everybody in view to make it seem reasonable and right. Haven’t the Paris designers been proving that for years?
He saw a familiar figure come into the dressing room, wearing a uniform like his own. “Why, coach Magill,” said Boley, turning with his hand outstretched. “I did not expect to meet you here.”
The newcomer frowned, until somebody whispered in his ear. “Oh,” he said, “you’re Boleslaw.”
“Naturally I’m Boleslaw, and naturally you’re my pitching coach, Magill, and why do you look at me that way when I’ve seen you every day for three weeks?”
The man shook his head. “You’re thinking of Granddaddy Jim,” he said, and moved on.
Boley stared after him. Granddaddy Jim? But Coach Magill was no granddaddy, that was for sure. Why, his eldest was no more than six years old. Boley put his hand against the wall to steady himself. It touched something metal and cold. He glanced at it.
It was a bronze plaque, floor to ceiling high, and it was embossed at the top with the words
World Series Honor Roll
. And it listed every team that had ever won the World Series, from the day Chicago won the first Series of all in 1906 until—until—
Boley said something out loud, and quickly looked around to see if anybody had heard him. It wasn’t something he wanted people to hear. But it was the right time for a man to say something like that, because what that crazy lump of bronze said, down toward the bottom, with only empty spaces below, was that the most recent team to win the World Series was the Yokahama Dodgers, and the year they won it in was—1998.
1998.
A time machine, thought Boley wonderingly, I guess what he meant was a machine that traveled in
time
.
Now, if you had been picked up in a time machine that leaped through the years like a jet plane leaps through space you might be quite astonished, perhaps, and for a while you might not be good for much of anything, until things calmed down.
But Boley was born calm. He lived by his arm and his eye, and there was nothing to worry about there. Pay him his Class C league contract bonus, and he turns up in Western Pennsylvania, all ready to set a league record for no-hitters his first year. Call him up from the minors and he bats .418 against the best pitchers in baseball. Set him down in the year 1999 and tell him he’s going to play in the Series, and he hefts the ball once or twice and says, “I better take a couple of warm-up pitches. Is the spitter allowed?”
They led him to the bullpen. And then there was the playing of the National Anthem and the teams took the field. And Boley got the biggest shock so far.
“Magill,” he bellowed in a terrible voice, “what is that other pitcher doing out on the mound?”
The manager looked startled. “That’s our starter, Padgett. He always starts with the number-two defensive lineup against right-hand batters when the outfield shift goes—”
“Magill! I am not any
relief
pitcher. If you pitch Boleslaw, you
start
with Boleslaw.”
Magill said soothingly, “It’s perfectly all right. There have been some changes, that’s all. You can’t expect the rules to stay the same for forty or fifty years, can you?”
“I am not a
relief
pitcher. I—”
“Please, please. Won’t you sit down?”
Boley sat down, but he was seething. “We’ll see about that,” he said to the world. “We’ll just see.”
Things had changed, all right. To begin with, the studio really was a studio and not a stadium. And although it was a very large room it was not the equal of Ebbetts Field, much less the Yankee Stadium. There seemed to be an awful lot of bunting, and the ground rules confused Boley very much.
Then the dugout happened to be just under what seemed to be a complicated sort of television booth, and Boley could hear the announcer screaming himself hoarse just overhead. That had a familiar sound, but—
“And here,” roared the announcer, “comes the all-important nothing-and-one pitch! Fans, what a pitcher’s duel
this
is! Delasantos is going into his motion! He’s coming down! He’s delivered it! And it’s
in there
for a count of nothing and two! Fans, what a pitcher that Tiburcio Delasantos
is!
And here comes the all-important nothing-and-two pitch, and—and—yes, and he struck him out!
He struck him out!
He struck him
out!
It’s a
no-hitter,
fans! In the all-important second inning, it’s a no-hitter for Tiburcio Delasantos!”
Boley swallowed and stared hard at the scoreboard, which seemed to show a score of 14-9, their favor. His teammates were going wild with excitement, and so was the crowd of players, umpires, cameramen and announcers watching the game. He tapped the shoulder of the man next to him.
“Excuse me. What’s the score?”
“Dig that Tiburcio!” cried the man. “What a first-string defensive pitcher against left-handers he
is!”
“The score. Could you tell me what it is?”
“Fourteen to nine. Did you
see
that—”
Boley begged, “Please, didn’t somebody just say it was a no-hitter?”
“Why, sure.” The man explained: “The inning. It’s a no-hit
inning.”
And he looked queerly at Boley.
It was all like that, except that some of it was worse. After three innings Boley was staring glassy-eyed into space. He dimly noticed that both teams were trotting off the field and what looked like a whole new corps of players were warming up when Manager Magill stopped in front of him. “You’ll be playing in a minute,” Magill said kindly.
“Isn’t the game over?” Boley gestured toward the field.
“Over? Of course not. It’s the third-inning stretch,” Magill told him. “Ten minutes for the lawyers to file their motions and make their appeals. You know.” He laughed condescendingly. “They tried to get an injunction against the bases-loaded pitchout. Imagine!”
“Hah-hah,” Boley echoed. “Mister Magill, can I go home?”
“Nonsense, boy! Didn’t you hear me? You’re on as soon as the lawyers come off the field!”
Well, that began to make sense to Boley and he actually perked up a little. When the minutes had passed and Magill took him by the hand he began to feel almost cheerful again. He picked up the rosin bag and flexed his fingers and said simply, “Boley’s ready.”
Because nothing confused Boley when he had a ball or a bat in his hand. Set him down any time, anywhere, and he’d hit any pitcher or strike out any batter. He knew exactly what it was going to be like, once he got on the playing field.
Only it wasn’t like that at all.
Boley’s team was at bat, and the first man up got on with a bunt single. Anyway, they
said
it was a bunt single. To Boley it had seemed as though the enemy pitcher had charged beautifully off the mound, fielded the ball with machine-like precision and flipped it to the first-base player with inches and inches to spare for the out. But the umpires declared interference by a vote of eighteen to seven, the two left-field umpires and the one with the field glasses over the batter’s head abstaining; it seemed that the first baseman had neglected to say “Excuse me” to the runner. Well, the rules were the rules. Boley tightened his grip on his bat and tried to get a lead on the pitcher’s style.
That was hard, because the pitcher was fast. Boley admitted it to himself uneasily; he was
very
fast. He was a big monster of a player, nearly seven feet tall and with something queer and sparkly about his eyes; and when he came down with a pitch there was a sort of a hiss and a
splat,
and the ball was in the catcher’s hands. It might, Boley confessed, be a little hard to hit that particular pitcher, because he hadn’t yet seen the ball in transit.
Manager Magill came up behind him in the on-deck spot and fastened something to his collar. “Your intercom,” he explained. “So we can tell you what to do when you’re up.”
“Sure, sure.” Boley was only watching the pitcher. He looked sickly out there; his skin was a grayish sort of color, and those eyes didn’t look right. But there wasn’t anything sickly about the way he delivered the next pitch, a sweeping curve that sizzled in and spun away.
The batter didn’t look so good either—same sickly gray skin, same giant frame. But he reached out across the plate and caught that curve and dropped it between third-base and short; and both men were safe.
“You’re on,” said a tinny little voice in Boley’s ear; it was the little intercom, and the manager was talking to him over the radio. Boley walked numbly to the plate. Sixty feet away, the pitcher looked taller than ever.
Boley took a deep breath and looked about him. The crowd was roaring ferociously, which was normal enough—except there wasn’t any crowd. Counting everybody, players and officials and all, there weren’t more than three or four hundred people in sight in the whole studio. But he could
hear
the screams and yells of easily fifty or sixty thousand—There was a man, he saw, behind a plateglass window who was doing things with what might have been records, and the yells of the crowd all seemed to come from loudspeakers under his window. Boley winced and concentrated on the pitcher.
“I will pin his ears back,” he said feebly, more to reassure himself than because he believed it.
The little intercom on his shoulder cried in a tiny voice: “You will not, Boleslaw! Your orders are to take the first pitch!”
“But, listen—”
“Take it! You hear me, Boleslaw?”
There was a time when Boley would have swung just to prove who was boss; but the time was not then. He stood there while the big gray pitcher looked him over with those sparkling eyes. He stood there through the windup. And then the arm came down, and he didn’t stand there. That ball wasn’t invisible, not coming right at him; it looked as big and as fast as the Wabash Cannonball and Boley couldn’t help it, for the first time in his life he jumped a yard away, screeching.
“Hit batter! Hit batter!” cried the intercom. “Take your base, Boleslaw.”
Boley blinked. Six of the umpires were beckoning him on, so the intercom was right. But still and all—Boley had his pride. He said to the little button on his collar, “I am sorry, but I wasn’t hit. He missed me a mile, easy. I got scared is all.”
“Take your base, you silly fool!” roared the intercom. “He
scared
you, didn’t he? That’s just as bad as hitting you, according to the rules. Why, there is no telling what incalculable damage has been done to your nervous system by this fright. So kindly get the bejeepers over to first base, Boleslaw, as provided in the rules of the game!”
He got, but he didn’t stay there long, because there was a pinch runner waiting for him. He barely noticed that it was another of the gray-skinned giants before he headed for the locker room and the showers. He didn’t even remember getting out of his uniform; he only remembered that he, Boley, had just been through the worst experience of his life.
He was sitting on a bench, with his head on his hands, when the owner’s uncle came in, looking queerly out of place in his neat pin-striped suit. The owner’s uncle had to speak to him twice before his eyes focused.
“They didn’t let me pitch,” Boley said wonderingly. “They didn’t want Boley to pitch.”
The owner’s uncle patted his shoulder. “You were a guest star, Boley. One of the all-time greats of the game. Next game they’re going to have Christy Mathewson. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?”
“They didn’t let me pitch,” said Boley.
The owner’s uncle sat down beside him. “Don’t you see? You’d be out of place in this kind of a game. You got on base for them, didn’t you? I heard the announcer say it myself; he said you filled the bases in the all-important fourth inning. Two hundred million people were watching this game on television! And they saw you get on base!”
“They didn’t let me hit either,” Boley said.
There was a commotion at the door and the team came trotting in screaming victory.
“We win it, we win it!” cried Manager Magill. “Eighty-seven to eighty-three! What a squeaker!”